Gem Calculator

All 4 types of gems have 14 different qualities ranging from ‘Chipped’ to ‘Radiant Star.’ Their effect is increased slightly each tier. The trick is to know what each gem is worth at each level, for example of a chipped gem is worth 10 gold then a flawed gem (the next tier) would be worth 80 gold (30 gold to buy/find the 3 flawed gems and 50 gold to combine them). Also, if you want 1 flawed gem and they cost 950 gold on the auction house you can calculate that you would be paying 300 gold for each chipped gem. Doing this math from tier to tier might be easy, but doing it across several tiers is pretty rough.

Gem Calculator

In order to quickly calculate how much your gems are worth and how much you should pay for gems off the auction house I’ve created the following gem calculator. Check the examples below to figure out how you should use it.

I want to combine gems from the auction house and resell them

If you want to do this, pick the lowest gem level you want to start with and search for the number you want to buy. It’s good to buy in powers of 3, such as: 3, 9, 27, 81, 243, 729, 2,187, etc. For this example we’ll evaluate buying 81 chipped gems to turn into 1 perfect (L5) gem. Search for 81 Chipped Gems and enter the quantity 81 and price per item (on the auction house) into the calculator below.

It will show you how many of each of the next several tiers you can combine from these 81 chipped gems as well as how much you could sell them for to break even. This calculation includes the gold cost to combine each group of 3 gems (500 from chipped->flawed, 750 from flawed->Regular). You can compare that price to the one on the auction house to determine if it’s a good idea to buy the chipped gems, combine them and resell them. If you use the value of 1 gold per chipped gem you’ll see that a perfect gem still costs 26,761 gold to combine (including crafting costs)!! This calculator also takes into account the Pages of Jewelcrafting, Tomes of Jewelcrafting and Tomes of Secrets that are needed at each tier to craft.

I want a Radiant Star but want to know what the cheapest way to get one is.

This is the second way you can use this calculator. To calculate the cheapest way to get a radiant star enter the quantity 1 in radiant star and then the auction house price for that gem under the price / value column. It will spit out how many of each low quality gem you would need to buy and the most you should pay for each lower tier gem. You can scan your auction house and compare prices and find the one that has the largest savings margin.

Not all Jewelers are created equal

Keep in mind that not everyone can combine L14 gems. You need to have leveled your Jewel to exalted before you can combine L10 gems. In order to combine L11, L12 and L13 gems you need to find their associated designs. Each row has the required jewel level to the left to determine who can and can’t combine into that level of gem. Also keep in mind that only L1 through L5 gems drop in the world, so it might be possible that L1 gems are worthless because no one can afford to combine them to L5 gems.

Cost of Page of Jewelcrafting:(34 minimum)
Cost of Tome of Jewelcrafting:(54 minimum)
Cost of Tome of Secrets:(64 minimum)

Req. Jewel Level

Quality

Quantity

Price / Value each

Post Price (before 15%)

L1: Chipped

1 – Appentice

L2: Flawed

2 – Journeyman

L3: Normal

3 – Adept

L4: Flawless

4 – Master

L5: Perfect

5 – Grand Master

L6: Radiant

6 – Illustrious

L7: Square

7 – Magnificent

L8: Flawless Square

8 – Resplendent

L9: Perfect Square

9 – Glorious

L10: Radiant Square

10 – Exalted

L11: Star

10 – Exalted + Design

L12: Flawless Star

10 – Exalted + Design

L13: Perfect Star

10 – Exalted + Design

L14: Radiant Star

Not only can you make gold buying gems, combining them and reselling them but you can also buy gear off the auction house with sockets, gem it and resell it for slightly more. Knowing what gems are best for each piece of gear is critical as well as the value of each tier of gem. The above table should help you calculate how much gems are worth or how much the gems you have should be worth.

hmm, i realized something when checking the calculator, the cost to combine if only using chipped would be (3^13)*50 = 79 716150, and adding the price of gems: (3^14)= 4 782969 * gold price
means at the cost of 1 gold you would need 85 million gold to make one radiant, 80 million is the minimum, no matter what.

ah, sorry guess my calculation would give 3 of the last one too … then the permanent combination price is 3^12*50 and not 13. 26.6 Million plus price of the gems. 3^13 = 1.6M*gem_price would be the variable.

meaning 10 gold for 1 chipped would be 27+16 = 43 million gold

meaning the economy is 3 times as cheap as first calculated.

hmm, should add a variable on combining price on calculator just to check the gem prices without combining price etc too.

Clearly, I am joining this conversation too late, but perhaps I can clarify.

Andreas, you have calculated the cost to make the number of flawed gems only required to combine a radiant star. After that, those must be made into normals, and those into flawless, and those into perfect, and so on and so on.

The figures state 80 Million GOLD for a single Radiant… sounds a little dramatic. Let’s hope that’s aren’t the final numbers. That really equates to what… hundreds of hours of play time, gaining equitable gold, to for a single Radiant Gem. Hmm..

By the way, can we get your permission to use this gem calculator on our own sites?

Feel free to use the calculator elsewhere. You can nab the javascript from the source, I put it all right into the header of my site and in one place. All I ask is that you include a non-nofollow link somewhere to my main site.

I’ve heard others mention that combination prices are higher as you level. If this is true the radiant star is going to be ridiculously scarce.

I know I am late to the party, but Holy Cow you need 19,683 of the best gem found in the game (not to mention all of the same color) to create a gem of the best quality in the game. And the stack limit is ten . . . can you alter that the way you do with blacksmithing materials and the AH? (4 stacks of 20 does not sell and returns in a larger stack of 80 to your inventory)

Regardless, it is close to 40 slots needed to just hold variously sized and colored gems as you progress towards a Radiant Star. Which is about 1/4 of your total inventory with a fully upgraded stash.

Meldora, Beautifully done. Accurate and Simple. For reference, perhaps you could include fields that list the combine prices for each tier next to the row. What is your opinion of this new information? Do gems seem to cost too much? I absolutely think so.

That means the value of the preceding gem is less than zero. For instance, let’s say that 3 chipped rubies cost 500 gold to turn into a single flawed ruby but the flawed ruby is only worth 400 gold. when it tries to calculate the value of the 3 chipped rubies it comes up with a negative number so it just says “Impossible”

Assuming vendor prices for pages and tomes of JC, and Flawless squares worth 3-4K it will make combining normal or better gems more profitable than vendoring them, and for rubies, which were selling for 8-9K, even chipped will be worth above vendor price.

Is there anyway you could add a little check box to the calculator so we can choose to include the 15% AH cut to the final total?

I have been looking through the AH and currently if I was to buy 9 Flawless Square Topaz at the current value 1750 and combine them into 1 Radiant Square I would need to sell it for 161,630 to break even (according to your calculator).

1 Radiant Square Topaz is currently selling for 185,000 gold so you would assume a profit but because the AH takes a 15% cut (27,750) you are actually only getting 157,250 gold which ends up being a loss of 4,380.

In order to ACTUALLY break even I would need to sell the gem at 190,153.

I made this mistake once and now I take the price from your calculator and divide it by 0.85 to get the AH break even price but having this option built into the calculator would be really helpful and convenient.

I may be wrong, but I’ve done a few experiments with red gems in weapons.

Tooltips in the AH ignore the effect of a red gem
the DPS in the search window ignores the red gem
If you sort by DPS, it INCLUDES the red gem in the order of the sort, but ignores it when reporting its value.
Any search you make includes the gem when it decides whether or not to show it.

I am hopeful that in some future patch, they will ignore gem values in the search if the search includes “Has sockets” so we could search for helms that have both 9% life and a socket, instead of reporting any helm with a +9% life gem.

When I ask for a breastplate with over 100 vitality and 3 sockets, I don’t want to have to look at page after page of things with blue gems in it.

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“Doing this math from tier to tier might be easy, but doing it across several tiers is pretty rough.”

Man thanks for the calculator! I think that ^ sums it up pretty good. I started trying to do it across 5 tiers…Sadly I was really close on my first run at the numbers not really trying. but started 2nd guessing, and double checking. Longer I tried the more confused I got lol!

Enter quantity 1 for the gem you want to craft. Go to the gem you want to buy to create it and enter the auction house price. now it’ll say the amount it would cost to buy the materials to make the gem you entered 1 for.

At a higher level (exalted) it only takes 2 radiants to make a Square and only 2 squares to make a Flawless square. Still 3 Perfect Squares to make a Radiant. Haven’t checked backwards but I am sure the gem requirement is less than the calc uses.

just to let you know there is a little errore with this claculator. L7 to L8 crafting only takes one Jewelcrafting tome and not two as this calculator seem to think. Try it with a small numbers and and dont forget to set the cost for the tomes as well, you will notice it doubles the costs for Tomes and sometimes that is actually more than half of the profit one would make when spending around 1m (i make 50k from 1m and it takes 9 minutes). Considering 50k profit and 25k is lost.